St. Matthew Passion

Overview

About three hours of music, first performed on Good Friday, 11 April 1727, at St. Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, where Johann Sebastian Bach had recently taken up the demanding post of cantor, responsible for supplying music for the city’s principal churches every week of the liturgical year. He revised the work at least once, most significantly around 1736, and the version generally performed and studied today largely reflects that later revision.

The libretto, the sections of poetic text that are not drawn directly from scripture, was written by Christian Friedrich Henrici, known by his pen name Picander, working closely with Bach, and interweaves three distinct kinds of text throughout the work: the Gospel narrative itself, chapters 26 and 27 of Matthew in Martin Luther’s German translation, sung essentially word for word by the Evangelist and the other named characters; newly written poetic texts by Picander, set as arias and accompanied recitatives, in which an unnamed contemplative voice reflects on and responds emotionally to the unfolding events; and traditional Lutheran chorales, hymn tunes the Leipzig congregation would have known from memory and sung themselves in church every week, interpolated at key moments so the story’s meaning is driven directly into the listener’s own devotional life rather than kept at the safe historical distance of ancient narrative.

The scoring is unusually large and specifically deployed: two full choirs, two separate orchestras, and, in the original Leipzig performance, the two ensembles were physically placed in opposite organ lofts of the church, creating a genuinely spatial, antiphonal effect, particularly striking in the double-choir turba, or crowd, passages where the two groups can seem to call across the church at each other. The work fell into obscurity after Bach’s death and was not performed again for roughly a century, until Felix Mendelssohn conducted a revival in Berlin in 1829 that is generally credited with beginning the modern rediscovery and reverence for Bach’s music broadly.

What happens

Part One: from the plot against Jesus to the arrest in Gethsemane. The work opens with an enormous double chorus, Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen, come, you daughters, help me lament, sung by both choirs together while a third, separate line of trebles sings the chorale melody O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig, O innocent Lamb of God, soaring above the main texture, establishing at the very start the work’s characteristic layering of narrative lament and traditional hymn.

The Evangelist, a tenor, then begins the Gospel narrative proper in recitative, a flexible, speech-like vocal style that follows the natural rhythms and stresses of the German text closely rather than imposing a fixed melodic shape on it. Bach gives Jesus’s own words a distinctive and immediately recognizable musical treatment throughout the work: unlike every other character’s recitative, which is accompanied only by the continuo, a bass line with simple chordal support, Jesus’s words are surrounded by a sustained halo of string chords, an effect commentators have long read as a musical nimbus, marking his speech as set apart from ordinary human speech even before a listener consciously registers why the sound feels different.

The section covers the plot by the chief priests and elders to have Jesus killed, the anointing at Bethany, Judas’s agreement to betray him for thirty pieces of silver, the Last Supper, and Jesus’s agony and prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, interspersed throughout with chorales, including the first appearance of the melody that will recur, in different harmonizations, at several later crucial moments, and with reflective arias in which the contemplative voice, not any character in the Gospel story itself, responds with grief, longing or resolve to what has just been narrated.

Part Two: the trial, crucifixion and burial. The second part begins after Jesus’s arrest and covers his interrogation before the high priest and the Sanhedrin, Peter’s threefold denial that he knows Jesus, the trial before Pontius Pilate, the crowd’s demand for his crucifixion, the crucifixion itself, and finally the burial.

Peter’s denial and its aftermath produces one of the work’s most celebrated individual movements: immediately after the Evangelist narrates that Peter went out and wept bitterly, an alto aria, Erbarme dich, mein Gott, have mercy, my God, follows, accompanied by a solo violin whose long, weeping melodic lines have made this single movement, independent of the rest of the three-hour work, one of the most frequently performed and recorded pieces from the entire Baroque repertoire.

The trial before Pilate contains the work’s most violent and dramatically compressed music: the crowd, sung by the full double chorus, twice demands Jesus’s crucifixion in short, driving, almost frenzied fugal outbursts, lass ihn kreuzigen, let him be crucified, music whose sudden brutality after the more reflective arias surrounding it still produces a genuine physical jolt in listeners and congregations even after repeated hearings.

The crucifixion itself is narrated with comparative restraint, the Evangelist’s plain recitative carrying most of the weight, punctuated by chorales and by a final extended alto aria and chorus, Können Tränen meiner Wangen, as Jesus’s death is described. The work closes not with any hint of resurrection, since Matthew’s narrative at this point in the Gospel ends with the burial rather than continuing to the following chapter, but with a hushed, extended final chorus, Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder, we sit down in tears, sung as though the mourners are gathered directly at the tomb, ending the entire three-hour work in quiet grief rather than triumphant resolution.

How to read it

Listen to it complete, in one sitting if you possibly can, following along with a libretto that shows the German text, an English translation, and a clear indication of which passages are Gospel narrative, which are Picander’s newly written poetry, and which are traditional chorales. Knowing at every moment which of these three layers you are hearing is essential to following what the work is actually doing.

Pay particular attention to the treatment of Jesus’s recitatives versus everyone else’s. Once you have noticed the sustained string halo surrounding his words specifically, and its conspicuous absence at the one moment late in the crucifixion narrative when it drops away, listen for exactly where that absence occurs and consider why Bach might have chosen that specific point to remove it.

Notice how the chorales function differently from the arias. The arias give voice to an individual contemplative response to the unfolding story; the chorales, set to melodies and often to actual verses the Leipzig congregation would have sung themselves in ordinary Sunday worship, are designed to pull the listener out of the position of a spectator watching ancient events and into direct, personal, first-person participation, asking what guilt or gratitude belongs to the listener now, not only to the historical figures the story concerns.

Read the two turba chorus outbursts demanding crucifixion, in Part Two, as a specifically musical argument about crowd violence, not simply as dramatically appropriate scene-setting. The compositional choices, tempo, vocal density, the sudden shift from the more reflective surrounding music, are doing real interpretive work about what mob cruelty actually sounds and feels like.

Consider why the work ends where it does, with burial and mourning rather than resurrection, and what that specifically Good Friday framing, appropriate to the liturgical occasion for which the piece was composed, does to its overall emotional and theological shape compared with a narrative that continued through to Easter.

Read Matthew’s Gospel chapters 26 and 27 directly, in Luther’s German if you can manage it or in a good English translation if not, before or alongside listening, to see exactly how closely and how selectively Bach and Picander have followed the Gospel text, and where the interpolated arias and chorales are doing work the bare narrative itself does not.

Questions it raises

• What does setting scripture to sustained musical narrative, rather than reading or preaching it, allow an audience or congregation to experience that plain reading does not?
• The chorales pull listeners from spectators into first-person participants. Does that shift change what kind of text this actually is, closer to liturgy than to narrative art?
• Jesus’s recitatives are marked by a halo of strings throughout, except at one crucial late moment. What does that specific musical choice communicate, and does it require prior knowledge of the convention to register at all?
• Is ending with burial and quiet mourning, rather than resurrection, a more honest or a less complete account of the story, given the liturgical occasion the work was written for?
• How does experiencing this story at three hours’ length and this scale of musical and emotional investment change what the events themselves mean, compared to hearing the same chapters read aloud in a few minutes?
• The work nearly disappeared for a century after Bach’s death. What does its rediscovery and subsequent canonization suggest about how cultural judgments of greatness form, and how fragile they can be?